Evening Standard October 1968
‘The idea for our “Two Virgins” album came from John. I know some people may think “ah, that bottoms-girl Yoko has persuaded John into this” but that wasn’t how it was. I don’t think my bottoms film inspired him either. I know some may think that I have a bottoms fetish, but when we made that film I was so embarrassed that I was never in the same room as the filming. I’m very shy. I just set up the camera and allowed the technicians to do it and my friends went before the camera as though they were being x-rayed.
‘John is very shy, too. I don’t think he’s seen the bottoms film He heard one of the tapes of my voice pieces and said this should be an LP record, and that if it were made it should have a picture of me naked on the cover. I don’t know why he said that. I suppose he just thought it would be effective. He didn’t even know me that well at the time. Anyway he sent me a drawing of me naked, and I was terribly embarrassed. But when we decided to make a record we decided that we should both be naked on the cover. He took the photograph with an automatic camera. No – we wouldn’t have had anyone else there to photograph us. And it’s nice. The picture isn’t lewd or anything like that. Basically we’re very shy and square people. We’d be the first to be embarrassed if anyone was to invite us to a nude party.’
Right now Yoko is probably the most enigmatic lady in the world. She came to London in 1966, had a couple of avant-garde exhibitions which met with generally favourable reviews, became a topic for national ribaldry when her film study of bottoms walking was shown in London, and then front page news when she struck up a friendship with John Lennon last spring.
But, somewhere in between the escalating-sized headlines, Yoko Ono, the artist, has lost her real public identity. Her notoriety doesn’t prepare one for the smiling, charming, slightly nervous woman who for months has waited at the recording studios while Lennon worked on the Beatles’ new album.
Of course we know she’s Japanese and very small, but it still comes as a surprise to notice the diminutive hands, with the nag-nailed fingers and that the eternal white tennis shoes she wears, tiny as they are, are actually about one and a half inches too long for her.
She’s thirty-four, twice married, and was brought up in Tokyo and America. Her family were rich (her father was a governor of a bank and she had an uncle who represented Japan at the United Nations) and her childhood was rigidly authoritarian and dedicated to education.
Her mother was Buddhist and her father Christian and, in addition, her school lessons were with a governess who took her in Bible reading and Buddhist scripture, as well as calligraphy, music and Japanese culture. She has a younger brother and sister.
‘I was like a domesticated animal being fed on information’, she says. ‘I hated it. And particularly music. And before my music lessons I used to faint – literally. I suppose it was my way of escape.’
On top of education came a strict moral code. ‘God was always watching, and any misdemeanours or bad thoughts had to be confessed to her mother.
‘I never went so far as to read comics, but I remember when I was about eight sneaking into my father’s library and reading adult books like Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. Of course, there was nothing improper in them, but I had to confess, and that was a terrible ordeal.
‘When I was older and received letters my mother always read them before I did, and if one was from a man admirer she would blame it upon some loose thoughts I’d been having.’
As a child she thinks she was probably considered precocious: she wrote a diary of poems at nine, and remembers with some pride that her teacher sent a letter to her mother saying that some day she would make a name for herself as a painter or a poet.
In her teens she tried to rebel by running away from home, but never got further than her granny’s home: ‘I always seemed to be very weak. Not just physically, although I was always catching colds, but weak in character too. I just wasn’t able to stand up to my mother, and before I did anything at all I used to ask permission.’
When she was eighteen her family went to live in New York, and, as she couldn’t be left alone in Japan at ‘such a dangerous age’, she went too and enrolled to read philosophy at Sarah Lawrence – ‘a school for girls who thought of nothing but marrying Harvard graduates.’
While at high school in Tokyo she had been very active in writing and dramatics, and it was while she was at Sarah Lawrence that her first book – Grapefruit – was germinating. From this point her obsession became instructional art and communication.
‘I was lying in bed one morning listening to the birds singing and I immediately wanted to put the sound into musical notes. But I found it was too complicated, and thought if I can’t do that perhaps it would be better to use it exactly as it is. So I wrote a one-note flute piece and the accompaniment was to be the sound of the birds singing. And I gave instructions that the one note on the flute should be played in the forest or somewhere while the birds sang.’
Her biggest problem at first was when she discovered that what she wanted to do was so new that there wasn’t anyone who would produce or accept it. So she rented a loft, converted it into a studio, and held happenings every other week. ‘I remember I bought a baby-grand piano and at the first concert I played it with my body, by rolling along the open string part. It snowed that day.
‘Another buzz I got was when we boiled a still of water and listened until it evaporated. One of the men there got so turned on by it that he filmed the whole event – but he found out later he’d forgotten to put any film in his camera.’
She finally gave up the loft when she felt it was becoming too much a part of the establishment. But she left nearly all her possessions behind her: ‘People cherish the idea of having things which belonged to me.’
It isn’t enough for Yoko that an artist present his work to the public. The public have to respond with a dialogue. To Yoko Ono everyone is an artist. Her works are unfinished and instructional.
When she asked people to cut her clothes off at one of her happenings, it was again their reaction which made the event. And the point about her ‘Two Virgins’ LP with Lennon (the cover of which shows them both naked) is not that people listen and say ‘very nice’, but that they add something of their own to it. (It’s sub-titled ‘Unfinished Music Number 1’, and will be followed by other albums.)
‘Most artists work in monologue form,’ she says. ‘I don’t believe in the artist deciding what has aesthetic values, but in letting the painting or music or whatever it is grow – be in a state of process. Everything I do is unfinished, so that you, or somebody else can add something and then pass it on.’
As an artist she’s more of a conceptualist than an actual craftsman. She thinks of an idea, and others perform it.
She was first married in 1957 to a Japanese composer (‘he used to write Stravinsky-type material, but he gradually changed after we met, and now he’s the foremost avant-garde composer in Japan’). After six years she left him, when she felt that they were becoming too much a part of the arts establishment. Her second husband was another artist (now film producer) Tony Cox. They have one daughter of five called Kyoko.
‘Both of my marriages were elopements,’ she says. ‘Basically I’m a romantic and believe in long-lasting relationships, but somehow I’ve failed up to now. I can’t be happy with relationships when communication starts to fail.
‘What is more important to me even than my work now is my relationship with John. Because John, too, is so creative, we can collaborate together.’
